14 June 2020

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Albums and Singles

As a former electronics specialist aboard a naval submarine and currently an audio engineer at his own Laminal Audio studio, AF Jones is clearly well versed in the world of sound design and audio processing. This becomes abundantly clear on A Jurist For Nothing given its nuance and production. Various electronic sounds and heavily processed field recordings are of course no surprise given the genre, but the subtle way in which Jones blends in conventional instrumentation, culminating in a Townes Van Zandt cover, is what makes this record most unique.

Gertrude Tapes

Ambience and not fully identifiable field recordings form the foundation of pieces such as "Anna Politkovskaya," named for an assassinated Russian journalist.Here Jones keeps a largely subtle backdrop, blending together rhythmic swirls and other layers of synthetic sound, tone and texture.The result is rather tense, but also captivating."Landover is Not the Same" has a similarly collaged feel to it.Jones uses the hollow spaciousness as the setting for incidental, distant conversations and heavy electronic undercurrents.To this he blends in some surging tones, never allowing the mix to become too sparse but never hitting the point of overload either.

The other pieces on the album start from a similar framework, but it is Jones's inclusion of acoustic guitar that brings a more conventional musicality to them."Renouncer" begins from a clearly electro-acoustic basis with the sound of water going from a light drip into heavy, torrential surges, paired with a harsh buzzing industrial drone.Amidst a blend of lower and higher frequencies and a mysterious thumping sound, he introduces a passage of clear, strummed guitar that adds an entirely different character of sound.

For "Miserere Mei" he introduces the guitar earlier in the piece, casting over hushed noises and elongated tonal passages.The electronics surge in dramatically and retreat just as quickly, with Jones punctuating the unending flow of sound with his guitar."Implicate Order" features a muted, but buzzing electronic passage at the onset, but it soon becomes a guitar-centric song.There is a bluesy repetition to his playing on "Lamps Are Stars," but the plodding electronics and subtle noise textures give it anything but a traditional feel.

Pure acoustic tone also opens the title piece, but accompanied by a slowly swelling magma crunch.With some bizarre outbursts, controlled feedback, and jerky pseudo-rhythms, the non-guitar parts call to mind some of Cabaret Voltaire’s earliest experiments while still sounding completely unique.The closing song, "Rake," differs significantly from the remainder of the record.Not just because is a cover of fellow Texan Townes Van Zandt’s work, but because of its faithfulness to the source material.Pared down to just Jones’s guitar and voice, with cello accompaniment from Judith Hamann and Lori Goldston, it is an intentionally sparse, emotional, and extremely human note to close the record on.

On paper, I would be suspicious of electro-acoustic collage experimentation that features prominent acoustic guitar given the stark, drastic contrast between those sounds, but Jones makes it work beautifully.The abstract, occasionally frightening, and consistently inhuman sounding electronics end up grounded perfectly by the guitar.Like a guiding hand helping to navigate through bleak darkness, it results in A Jurist For Nothing having a distinct, inimitable character that comes together perfectly.

Samples Available Here

13 June 2020

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Albums and Singles

Alva Noto returns to his much-awaited Xerrox project with Vol. 4, the fourth installment of the five-piece intended series based on the concept of digital replication of source material.

Using the process of copying as a basis, the Xerrox series deals with the manipulation of data by means of endless reproduction.  Due to the inherent fallacy of the procedure involving the making of copies made from other copies, everyday’s sounds become so altered that they can be hardly associated with the source material. As a result, entirely new sounds are  created: copies of originals become originals themselves.

Following Xerrox Vol. 1 (2007), Vol. 2 (2009), Vol. 3 (2015), Carsten Nicolai continues the pentalogy eluding the accuracy  and precise sound design for which he's renowned, and turning to a more harmony-driven composition technique.

Unlike the previous Xerrox albums,  whose starting point is a set of samples extracted from external sources and fragments   of recordings, Vol. 4 compounds under a unified cinematic soundscape, warm chords, thrumming digital ambiences, liquified electronics, drones, and noise sustained by floods of strings.  The tension between the organic warmth and static curves,   broads tones into distant roars and electronic cascade of sounds.

While Alva Noto's oeuvre is predominantly affiliated with pristine sound design, Xerrox holds more intimate gestures and  emotional sensibility.  This fourth volume shuns further from the conceptualism and orderliness of prior musical outputs,  ranging from heart-warming elegies to mind-bending sci-fi projections in extrasolar territories.

More information will soon be found here.

13 June 2020

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Albums and Singles

Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek needs no introduction - a hugely prolific electronic experimenter who has recorded for labels such as Type, Digitalis, Dekorder, Western Vinyl, and many many more, Where To Now Records are truly humbled to handle his latest collaborative work Oehoe. Produced in collaboration with viola/violinist Anne Bakker, a classically trained solo artist in her own right, and currently performing strings as part of Agnes Obel's band, Machinefabriek here has sown a landscape of Anna's raw violin, viola, and vocal improvisations into a stirring body of work which merges tradition, experimentation, and whimsical curiosity to create a distinctively unique album which is both deeply moving and playfully dissonant in equal measure.

Given that Anne's improvised vocals are wordless throughout, it is to Rutger's absolute credit that he has assembled and transcended these intonations to often devastating emotional effect. Anna's vocal experiments exude classical polyphonic antiquity, they lushly hover above her own Reichian minimalist string arrangements, and Machinefabriek's deeply brooding, cacophonic synthesized soundscapes. Across these 10 pieces we delve into a world which seamlessly moves between a state of harmonious contentment; or a very murky calm, to moments of lively ecstasy, and deep deep down to a vast and brooding melancholy.

More information can be found here.

13 June 2020

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Albums and Singles

Music for Violin Alone was recorded in a makeshift studio in an empty house in Le Poujol sur Orb during the first two weeks of the French lockdown. Recorded both as a response to all loss of work due to COVID-19 and a way to be heard again. The pieces on the album are the pieces I've come to discover and learn during the two years of maternity leave. Two years of maternity leave have also been two years of creative silence, a search for new approaches, repertoire and ways of playing.

Only after finishing the recording process I realised the connection between the works - they have all been written by or dedicated to violinists-composers (with Oliver Leith being an exception) - J.S.Bach, Angharad Davies, Nicola Matteis Jr., Malcolm Goldstein (dedicatee of Cage's "Eight Whiskus" and Tenney's "Koan").

The album opens with "Circular Bowing Study" by Angharad Davies - an extended exploration of a technique no matter how limited, it continues back through the ages with works that are filled with silence (Bach, Cage and Leith) and works with almost total absence of it (Tenney, Matteis), and closes with my own composition - broken harmonics of a string trapped inside a ring.

It's like a map of invisible violin sounds where past and present pathways are being drawn and redrawn over and over again until they are confined to a single technique or a broken sound or disappear into a total silence.

More information can be found here.

13 June 2020

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Albums and Singles

Kaloli is the debut full-length LP from Kampala’s darkest electro-percussion group Nihiloxica. The album marries the propulsive Ugandan percussion of the Nilotika Cultural Ensemble with technoid analog synth lines and hybrid kit playing from the UK’s pq and Spooky-J. The result is something otherworldly. Kaloli journeys through the uncharted space between two cultures of dance music, where the expression of traditional elements mutates into something more sinister and nihilistic.

The album takes its name from the Luganda word for the Marabou stork. Kaloli are carrion birds that can be seen amassing in areas of festering waste around the country, particularly in Kampala, with its heightened levels of urban pollution. Freakishly large in size and riddled with amorphous boils, growths and tufts, these toxic creatures thrive on detritus. Rising skyward on huge air currents, however, their wretchedness is softened as they effortlessly glide above the city. Nihiloxica tread a similar path to the kaloli: a dissonant, polyrhythmic assault on the senses holds a transcendental beauty.

Since 2017 the band have honed their sound in residence at Nyege Nyege’s Boutiq Studio in Kampala, one of the most vital cultural melting pots on the continent. Their debut self-titled EP for the acclaimed Ugandan label was an immediate success. An auspicious project between two UK musicians and a Kampala-based percussion troupe, Nilotika Cultural Ensemble, sparked a musical dialogue across continents with the aim to fuse two distanced cultures of dance music into one aural entity. The synergy between the group was instantaneous. The EP was composed, rehearsed and recorded with a minimal studio setup in the space of a month, giving Nihiloxica a rawness and brutality that pushed it into best-of-year lists across the world. However, this proved to be only a snapshot of what Nihiloxica were capable of. After a year of jamming together and road-testing material live on stage across the world, the second EP, Biiri, showed the band communicating with each other more freely. Their musical vocabulary was becoming ever more intricate. Now, after three successful European tours, this cross-continental conversation has brought us Kaloli.

Recorded with Ross Halden at Hohm Studios directly after a concert supporting Aphex Twin, Kaloli captures the vitality of Nihiloxica’s show-stopping live performances and magnifies it with pq’s honest, powerful production. For five days in September 2019 in Bradford, Nihiloxica laid down the bulk of the album: eight synthetic abstractions of the traditional folk-rhythms of Uganda. At the heart of every song is a groove, a drum pattern to be explored and developed. Each takes us through a different rhythmic territory: Busoga from the east of Uganda, Bwola from the north, Gunjula from the central region, Buganda.

The soundscape is dominated by the ancestral Bugandan drum set, consisting of Alimansi Wanzu Aineomugisha and Jamiru Mwanje on the engalabi (long drums - a tall Ugandan sister to the djembe), Henry Kasoma on the namunjoloba (a set of four small, high pitched drums) and Henry Isabirye on the empuunyi (a set of three low pitched bass drums). Wanzu also plays the ensaasi (shakers). One of the major additions to the sonic palette of Kaloli are the electronic drum sounds used more increasingly by Jacob Maskell-Key (Spooky J), providing an additional link between worlds, evident as electro-percussive punctuation on Salongo and Gunjula. The patterns beaten out by the ensemble are then explored harmonically and spectrally by the synths of Peter Jones (pq), stretching and searching for hooks and sounds among the rhythmic mayhem like kaloli picking and poking through decaying matter.

For their forthcoming release on Crammed Discs, Nihiloxica's dialogue reaches ever further into new areas. "Busoga" is dreamy and melodious, while "Bwola" plunges straight into armageddon. "Tewali Sukali" embraces the band's furtive heavy metal influences much more closely. With more running time, the band have been able to sculpt their most personal, revealing work to date: one that stands up as a true home listening experience. Giving listeners a further glimpse into Nihiloxica's musical process are snippets from rehearsal sessions that took place ahead of the recording in Jinja, near to where Nyege Nyege festival takes place. In the third and final of these interlude we witness Jally drop his engalabi in favour of a hand-made flute to lend the album a tranquil ad-libbed outro, accompanied by an evening chorus of Jinja’s plentiful crickets.

Once described by Gareth Main in the Quietus as "the best band on Earth right now," it's no surprise that Nihiloxica have plaudits from an esteemed list of sources. Notably by publications such as Pitchfork, the Guardian and Les Inrockuptibles, the group's sound has been widely described as eerie, hypnotic, floor shaking and body moving. With an extensive touring schedule ahead of them, including dates confirmed at Sonar and Dekmantel, Nihiloxica's Kaloli looks set to spread its wings in 2020.

More information can be found here.

31 May 2020

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Albums and Singles

Ellen Fullman's drones are as massive as the custom instruments that she creates this tremendous music on. She is known for her 70-foot Long String instrument, tuned in just intonation and played with rosin-coated fingers. At first listen, it's a monolithic block of sound, stretching out into seeming infinity. But on closer inspection, there are many subtleties of pitch, dynamics, and surround sound that captivate and maintain interest.

Superior Viaduct

In the Sea was originally self-released by Fullman on cassette in 1987, both sides have been significantly shortened for this double LP issue. Side A, the title track, folds and unfolds just like a body of water, with dissonances in its depths and joyful sunshine striking its crests. It ebbs and flows, crashing against its shoreline with a new pause, a new phrase, a new sweep of sound as big as the ocean. In "Staggered Stasis," side B of the original cassette and this LP, there is a wall of sound with features as varied and beautiful as an abstract painting, never ending but always changing in tiny ways. It evokes a space as dense and warm as the womb, or as large and striking as the grand canyon. There are beating notes neighboring each other even as there are high harmonics atop deep bass strings. It roils and bubbles in the midtones like a boiling pot of water, and for all its "stasis" it manages to somersault along briskly.

Sides C and D on the album are from other sources and, as such, are both very distinct from the first half of the album. "Work For Four Players And 90 Strings" was a cassette release of its own in 1987 while "Work For Two" is a previously unreleased recording from 1988. Both are presented in edited excerpts. Each sweep the senses with washes of sound, strokes across the musical spectrum like streaks of watercolor. Whereas In the Sea (the first record) is about movement in stasis, these two pieces are busy with huge evolutions of sound and broad ranges of changing palettes. Consider this as chamber music superimposed on a drone instrument, and it has all the dynamism of such. The beauty of these two concluding pieces is that of dappled light moving and shifting while peeking through tree branches on a bright sunny day.

This is drone music that is easy to listen to, a direct descendant of Terry Riley's cult of the beautiful. With its one of a kind instrumentation, it is unlike anything else in recorded music. It is pleasant, lulling, and rich enough to spark emotion. It is a lovely document from a well known luminary in the field.

samples can be heard here

31 May 2020

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Albums and Singles

Fitted are Mike Watt (The Minutemen, fIREHOSE, many others), Graham Lewis and Matthew Simms of Wire, and Bob Lee (The Freeks, The Black Gang, Fearless Leader). The names Watt and Lewis should make most music aficionados run for their wallet, but the first album from this supergroup was released with little fanfare. Imagine tossing together the punk of The Minutemen and Wire’s experimentalism, alternately fronted by Lewis’ resigned, wavering vocals and Watt’s staccato uttering. The two legendary bassists provide an onslaught of heaviness, broken by the psychedelic guitar swirls of Simms and Lee’s bright drum beats, and then drive everything home founded on years of musicianship from four practiced musicians.

Org Music

Originally formed for a one-off gig at Wire's 2017 DRILL LA festival, the four went on to release this album of originals in November 2019. The contents are very much of these two masters, and taken up a notch with the addition of Sims and Lee. Watt cites Wire as an influence on Minutemen, and brings in Lee from Los Angeles glam metal outfit Fearless Leader. Both Watt and Lee played in Los Angeles garage punk group The Black Gang. A brief online search finds Black Gang blazing through a fierce cover of "TV Eye," which makes sense, since Watt has played with reformed versions of The Stooges. The album matches the length of a garage punk album (it is over in about 40 minutes) but never sits still, each song bringing a new surprise.

Despite the history of each member, it would be limiting to call it a punk album. Both Watt and Wire have broken the boundaries of this label for years. The closest Fitted get to this is in "The Chunk that Got Chewed," which kicks off with in-your-face Minutemen sound that segues into a familiar fIREHOSE sound, and then spreads out into a gorgeous expanse of fuzzy landscape, before cascading back into punk territory. Lewis’ unique vocals bring in a disaffected pop-punk sentiment and spoken-word cadence, while Simms brings in atmospheric guitar riffs that shine through the concentrated bass lines. Lee knows exactly when to use his drums to bring things back together when electronics, bass and guitar diverge into aggressive psychedelic exploration ("Magically Blessed"). Finally, as if to prove this is anything but a punk album, the album ends by floating out into space ("The First Fit"), a psychedelic journey of intense proportions -- subtle drums, droning bass, chiming interstellar guitar tones, and splashes of spaced-out electronics -- all barely grounded by aching vocals by Graham.

Writing about legends can make for a daunting task. Writing about legends that expand outside of their bands can prove more difficult when enshrouded in such legendary status. Both Watt and Lewis could easily rest on their laurels, each having played in such storied groups. Instead, Fitted is unlike these aforementioned bands, meshing the best of each member to create something far greater.

samples can be found here

31 May 2020

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Albums and Singles

In late 2019, multi-instrumentalists Clay Parton, Canaan Dove Amber, and Jason Albertini, AKA Duster, quietly announced their first release in 19 years would be available in December. The band have never been a household name—despite being a long-standing influence on indie bands across an array of genres such as slowcore, space-rock, lo-fi, or post-rock—but with this release it is a great time to get acquainted. The same core formula of keeping it simple is still here: as stated by Parton, they try to strip out as much as possible while conveying the same underlying sentiment. However, the 2019 formula leaves Duster changed. If the band were slotted into the slowcore genre before, then this release takes the genre to new breaking points. This is a great thing, because like a rubber band stretched to maximum tension, the backlash from letting go is going to be powerful, but sting on contact. The experience is worth it.

Mudd Guts

Each member of Duster plays multiple instruments, constantly refining guitar tones and toying with recording techniques to bring forth emotive sounds from their instruments, and then further strip these away to get at a minimalist core that supports the music's original intent, allowing passages of silence, muffled static, and downplayed vocals to enhance the mood. Like their previous albums, they record straight to tape. The music feels wide and vast, flowing without urgency, sludgy, raw, solemn at the surface. Such stretched and meandering music can serve as a backdrop in which to zone out, but conversely, it can provoke a challenging listen when trying to get a handle on something that can easily be construed as laborious, repetitive and trudging.

This is the tension that Duster creates—that moment the rubber band has been stretched to maximum, holding steady—the receiver waiting, knowing what's to come: the inevitable sting of the rubber band's release. In the midst of that tension, further layers of sound build up emotional impact, delivering the sting. As an example, "Damaged" is a wall of noise with a marching drum beat serving as the song's foundation, while minor chord progressions, unique electronic and acoustic sound effects dot the slow musical landscape. The onslaught of wailing guitars and muffled vocals on "Go Back" create a feeling of ache, lyrics echoing a longing to return to what was: "I want to go back to the place / where everything was okay." Throughout the album, speed, lyrics and sound work together to communicate tension and sting.

Like the aftermath of a tensed band connecting to skin, Duster leaves a welt and a memory. The flavor of music and lyrical content may seem depressing. Any listener of Unknown Pleasures knows the feeling of cold, brought out by Martin Hannett's now-familiar production techniques. Duster on the other hand have crafted music that feels warm, comforting and connecting, relatable on a human level, while not forgetting that humanity can be depressing. The brief and gorgeous closer "The Thirteen" drives this home in relatively few lyrics: "The simple things are haunting me / All the steps are incomplete." What does it mean? Perhaps it means the simplest questions are the most difficult to answer, and figuring out this thing called life has no rhyme nor reason. Maybe we're all just taking incomplete steps to get through it. The beauty of Duster's music is that it challenges listeners sonically and lyrically to come to their own conclusions about the content.

Sound samples can be found here.

31 May 2020

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Albums and Singles

One aspect of Benjamin Finger's work that I have always appreciated is his drive to continually tweak and reinvent his sound with each new album. On this latest release, apparently his 14th solo full-length, he opts for a loose, stripped-down approach, focusing mostly on guitar sketches that often feel like the demo tapes for a solid shoegaze album. In some ways, it is quite remarkable how far Finger has moved away from the skewed, psych-damaged pop of early albums like Woods of Broccoli and Sombunall, but that trajectory makes perfect sense if his career is viewed like a disintegrating Basinski-esque tape loop: his pop sensibility has not disappeared so much as it has been ingeniously diffracted, distilled, and deconstructed into new forms with each fresh release. That said, Less One Knows has a stronger emphasis on hooks than a lot of other recent Finger albums and that is a welcome development. This album may not be quite as substantial as some of his other fare, but the comparative intimacy, melodicism, and fragility suit his aesthetic nicely.

Dead Definition

The introductory "Open Phase" is a fairly representative example of Finger's vision for this album, as a blurred and pulsing guitar motif is subtly fleshed out with additional layers before evolving into a more distorted and intense crescendo.The individual motifs do not follow a conventional enough structure to resemble a fully formed song, however, which makes the piece feel like a spontaneous improvisation.I suspect it was indeed exactly that, but it is an intriguing one nonetheless, as the various themes unpredictably reverse, flutter, and warble as the piece unfolds.There is also an ephemeral sliding motif that I wish Finger had built further upon, which is a bit of recurring theme with this release: plenty of great ideas casually tossed off without further development.That said, there are also some pieces in which Finger does fully capitalize on his more inspired ideas, as he does with the tenderly quivering descending chords in the lovely "Head Fading Blues."That simple and beautiful piece is unquestionably one of the album's highlights, but there are several other pieces in which Finger decisively hits the mark as well.I am especially fond of one of the album's two vocal pieces, "Crushed at Sea," which favorably recalls a disjointed and hallucinatory homage to classic '90s emo bands like American Football or early Promise Ring.At its core lies a legitimately good song with strong melodic hooks, but it is beautifully battered, corroded, and disrupted by backwards chords, squalls of guitar noise, and a patina of static.

The album remains fairly strong in the wake of "Crushed at Sea," as Finger had no shortage of inspired and varied ideas, even if he stopped shy of quite expanding most of them into fully formed songs.The best of the remaining pieces is by far "Still Dreaming Green," which is a gorgeously woozy and tremolo-heavy reverie that strikes the perfect balance between soulful and dreamlike.Elsewhere, "Foggy View" is a quietly lovely marriage of clean arpeggios with throbbing, burbling, and chirping electronics."Bothered Earwaves," on the other hand, sounds like the build-up and roiling, dissonant crescendo of a killer ‘90s emo/post-hardcore song, albeit one with some ghostly and psychedelic enhancements thrown into the mix.The droning closer "Fade Away" is noteworthy as well, as a processed guitar with a sharp, rattling texture lazily sweeps through the blissful haze.

If Less One Knows is viewed as a kind of sketchbook rather than a focused and complete new statement, it is quite a successful and absorbing one, as it is positively brimming with great ideas executed beautifully.I am easily able to find something to love about nearly every song on the album and Finger manages to maintain his distinctive voice even as he dabbles in a host of disparate directions.Of course, the catch with filling an album full of promising vignettes is that it can be maddeningly teasing at times and Less One Knows definitely left me with a feeling akin to eating a bunch of (admittedly tasty) snacks while fantasizing about a far more substantial meal.The one exception to that feeling is "Crushed at Sea," which is easily one of the most focused and melodic would-be singles that Finger has recorded in recent years (and one in which his own voice makes a rare appearance as well).Longtime fans will not want to sleep on that piece, nor will they want to miss "Still Dreaming Green."Aside from those highlights, Less One Knows feels like a relatively minor/transitional release within Finger's discography, but it is the kind of minor release that suggests that some major creative breakthroughs are currently taking shape in his Oslo studio.

Samples can be found here.

31 May 2020

Administrator

Albums and Singles

It has been three years since Natalie Chami’s last solo album (2017’s dreamlike and seductive Love Sick) and quite a lot has changed in her life since then. Given that this project is essentially a very intimate and abstractly diaristic one, that passing of time has unsurprisingly led to significant (if subtle) transformations in the tone of Chami's vision. Thankfully, her genius for soulful, sensuous, and blearily hallucinatory pop-like improvisations remains wonderfully intact, but Acquiesce feels more like a series of languorous, meditative reveries than it does an emotionally smoldering R&B-inspired break-up album. Admittedly, the collision of that latter aesthetic with Chami's artier, more experimental side was a large part of what made Love Sick such a great and unique album, but her emotional directness, natural fluidity, and strong melodic intuition are every bit as evident and effective as they were 2017. While Acquiesce does not quite rise to the same level as its predecessor as a whole, its handful of highlights are easily as gorgeous as any of Chami's previous work.

NNA Tapes

It is largely a myth that suffering inspires great art, as being miserable can often be creatively paralyzing rather than a trigger for a cathartic breakthrough.And sometimes it leads to neither, though it is worth noting that striving to create great art in the first place invites its own torments.That said, every artist has their own individual way of processing their emotions and those intense feelings can certainly lead to a powerful vision if they are successfully harnessed.Based on Love Sick, Chami is unquestionably an artist who excels at transforming deep emotions into great art, as the project's spontaneous/improvisatory nature makes it a direct (if impressionistic) reflection of her inner state at any given point.Chami is, of course, well aware of that relationship, noting that after Love Sick, she "recorded less music in a single year than she ever had before" and "later realized it was because she was happy."That does not mean that she was not playing and performing regularly, as Chami is always involved in various Chicago-area collaborative endeavors, but her far more personal solo work was simply awaiting a fresh spark to ignite the next therapeutic creative outpouring.As it happens, inspiration eventually came in the form of mounting anxieties about the nature of happiness, falling in love, and her future.Trying to process a host of nagging worries and uncertainties is certainly never pleasant, but I greatly admire Chami's artistic honesty: I am sure she could have easily thrown together an album of wordless vocalizations over an accumulated backlog of cool synth motifs and no one would have been the wiser.Instead, she waited until her tumultuous thoughts gradually took shape into something intimate and meaningful.

Aside from the significantly diminished R&B influence, Acquiesce features the same minimal, uncluttered palette that I have grown to expect from Chami’s work: tender, slow-moving synth themes and floating, hazy vocals composed of poetic phrase fragments.With TALsounds, mood, emotion, and flow have always been far more important than the actual words that Chami sings, as she "treats her voice like an instrument that breathes calm into interwoven electronic parts, often leaning into vowels instead of phrases."In fact, Chami often does not fully realize what she is singing until she transcribes her lyrics post-performance, which probably provides a very interesting window into her subconscious.Occasionally, however, Chami will fixate on a specific phrase and elevate it into something akin to a mantra, as she does with "there's so much more" on the album's gorgeously swirling and swooning centerpiece "Else."For the most part, however, Chami's vocals blur so seamlessly into her synth themes that I do not even notice when they are absent, as they are on the tender and bittersweetly beautiful "Conveyor."Obviously some feelings are ineffable, but given the "live" nature of these pieces, Chami is also limited in how many things she can do at once: if she is immersed in a particularly layered and melodic synth motif, spontaneously conjuring up words and a separate vocal melody is not exactly feasible (and would probably be superfluous anyway).That said, most of the album’s highlights still tend to feature vocals of some kind, even if they are not quite the focal point or hook.For example, the closing "No Restoring" is an absolutely sublime reverie of warm, quavering drones and lazily blooping melodies long long before it is enhanced by a dreamy haze of cooing vocals layers.The same is true of the gently burbling and spacey psychedelia of the organ-like "No Rise."

The beauty of Chami's aesthetic is not without its minor frustrations though, as I am certainly curious about what she could achieve if she set out to write and record a non-improvised batch of songs (or at least devoted some more attention to beats and grooves).Given how central spontaneity is to her vision, however, I suspect wishing for a meticulously crafted suite of fully formed synthpop gems is as doomed and irrational as wishing that she would figure-skate or raise llamas instead of devoting herself to music: this is what she does and she does it beautifully.I dearly wish I could train my mind to stop heading in that "what if?" direction whenever experimental music brushes tantalizingly close to melodic songcraft, as the world is full of catchy songs and there is only one project like TALsounds.Consequently, both it and its rawness and imperfection should be cherished.Acquiesce could not possibly have been anything other than what it is, as Chami is an artist fully devoted to directness, honesty, and immediacy.Anything less would likely break the precarious spell necessary for glimpses of sublime, soulful heaven like "Conveyor" and "Else."As long as Chami keeps having flashes of inspiration like those, she should have absolutely no misgivings at all about sticking with her current process.It is damn nice to have TALsounds back.

Samples can be found here.